Optimal Title Tag for Wordpress

Some time ago I wrote a post titled “Keep your Title Tags short and pertinent“ outlining the best practices for Title tags. Most blogging platforms come with a standard Title tag structure that places the blog name and post title on single post pages. Suppose you have the “ABC Blog” and you just published a post called “Top 10 Firefox extensions”. In that case your Title tag for that single page would be “ABC Blog - Top 10 Firefox extensions”.

This Title structure is good but not optimal. The best possible Title tag for a single blog post is the title of the post alone. The name of the blog will increase the number of keywords (reducing the value of each one) and it might not be related to the post content at all.

Below you will find the code that I use for my Title tag. This code will display the blog name on the home page, the post title on single post pages and the blog name plus category name for category pages.

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();} elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();} else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

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Daniel Scocco on February 8, 2007 | Filed Under WordPress

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33 Responses to “Optimal Title Tag for Wordpress”

Lionel Young on February 8th, 2007 6:47 pm

Great tip! If you change your “echo ‘Daily Blog Tips’” above to bloginfo(’name’), you can help people be more lazy and just copy and paste. Like this:
sujan patel on February 8th, 2007 9:56 pm

I am using SEO Title Tag plugin for wordpress and it pretty much does the same thing. I’d much rather use the code above.
Fanatyk on February 9th, 2007 12:56 am

I wrote sth similar on opn wp
Daniel on February 9th, 2007 1:08 am

Lionel, yeah you can insert that line to get the name automatically, but I left the written name cause I also experimented with different descriptions and combinations to see what would work best.

Fanatyk, I will check your version.
John on February 9th, 2007 9:44 am

That is a really great tip. I use a plugin called “Jeromes Keywords” for all of my posts. Your code piece will make a nice addition. Thank you.
Daniel on February 9th, 2007 10:10 am

John, dont forget to use Jeromes keywords to produce a dynamic Meta Keywords tag. It works really well.
WallerBlog on February 10th, 2007 7:15 am

Very nice. I’ve never really though about keywords being diluted by my page title. I’ve just implemented this on WallerBlog.com Thanks for the tip!
Vincent Chow on April 18th, 2007 11:27 pm

What about page title? It will display your blog’s name only without any information about the page with the code above.
Max Pool on April 26th, 2007 8:45 am

I second what Vincent asks? What about page title? For example your about page should read ‘About’, ‘Daily Blog Tips - About’, or some permutation of the sorts.
Max Pool on April 26th, 2007 8:53 am

Fixing Daniels above code snippet, the answer to Vincent and my question would be:
Max Pool on April 26th, 2007 8:54 am

Sorry, last comment post removed the HTML

just add the following else if statement into Daniels code:

elseif (is_page()) { echo ‘{codesqueeze} - ‘; wp_title(”); }
programlar on May 6th, 2007 3:03 am

What about page title? It will display your blog’s name only without any information about the page with the code above.
Daniel on May 6th, 2007 7:54 am

Programlar, from my experience the optimal title tag for the homepage is just the blog name.

If you are aiming for a specific keyword that is not related to your blog name then sure change it.
Phil on May 15th, 2007 2:30 pm

Hi there,

I came up with something similar myself, but my implementation displays your blog name and then the tagline on your home page and the page title (either post title, page title, archive, category, etc.) then your blog name on every other page.

Have a look at my title structure for wordpress and let me know what you think.
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Thanks just what I was looking for.
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Poh Ee on February 17th, 2008 8:11 pm

Just use “all-in-one-seo-pack” plugin for Wordpress blog.
It let you configure the title dynamically.